Bryce Harrington wrote:
Trust me, I am *WELL* aware of this. Unlike Linus, I myself was one of the people from the open source community who jumped into the Mozilla project right from the start and was helping with coding, bug fixing, etc. And I got burned first hand from the conference room phenomenon. I had been working on some ideas I had with generalizing the toolbars into a general purpose syntax that would work across all of the platforms, when one day the Netscape guy I was assisting came back and said they'd had a face to face meeting and had a "really exciting idea" (XUL).
Needless to say, I was extremely disenchanted by the fact that this decision was made that totally invalidated all my own work, yet I'd had absolutely no say in the matter. I thought XUL was an interesting idea, and it was sort of cool that it was inspired in some fashion from what I'd done, but I wasn't included in the discussions that came up with it. This really burnt me out, and I basically gave up on Mozilla after that, and wandered off to better things.
Anyway, trust me, I know *exactly* the pain that can result from these sort of "smokey back room deals".
This is a great story, and I hope that you've told it to the people at Xara. I was reading "Things that make us Smart" and the author was talking about how storytelling is a very human interaction. When he observed business meetings he noticed that they usually started with someone giving a slide presentation containing lots of data, then everyone sat around and told stories about the problem, and then a decision was made. The stories were closer to the decision than the data.
Bryce, this is your story; tell it! (in 500 words or less, please ;)
Also, I don't think that Xara is getting beat up on, I think that we're debating strategy -- I like John's strategic consultant term (it's going on my resume). Hopefully they'll read the archives and learn some potential problems, so when the do announce their policies (and I'm more worried about policy than code) they'll impress us all.
--Ted